


Very Fluffy Domesticity

by Azdaema



Category: A Series of Unfortunate Events (TV), A Series of Unfortunate Events - Lemony Snicket
Genre: Birth Control, Brother/Sister Incest, Discussion of Pregnancy, Domestic Fluff, Established Relationship, F/M, Offscreen butchering a sheep, Responsibility!, The Island (ASOUE), Violet and Klaus are married as fuck, parenting!, underage parenthood
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-12
Updated: 2019-01-12
Packaged: 2019-10-08 13:44:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,596
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17387438
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Azdaema/pseuds/Azdaema
Summary: Featuring the Island, sheep intestines, responsibility, and parenthood.





	Very Fluffy Domesticity

**Author's Note:**

  * For [thecloserkin (tabacoychanel)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tabacoychanel/gifts).



> For my friend thecloserkin. Without your encouragement, I never would have redone the ending, or perhaps even finished writing it at all—and I'm very glad I did.
> 
> And thanks to The Spirit of Indifference too, for beta-ry.

The Baudelaires' parents had provided them with surprisingly comprehensive books on the topic of sexual education, which contained very sound advice. These books had, however, been rather lacking in the area of historical context, which had lead Klaus to do more research on his own. This is how, at age 12, he ended up reading about the history of condoms and learning that they had commonly been made of intestines in the days before rubber.

Sunny had been eyeing the sheep ever since they washed up on the island. Finally, after much pestering, she had finally persuaded Violet and Klaus to help her to butcher one.

It has been somehow both easier _and_ more traumatic than Klaus had imagined. For all the death they had seen, they had never had cut out lungs or a heart from a body before.

The butchering had been a difficult process, taking the better part of the day. Violet had cried at one point, as had Klaus. By the end, they were all sweaty and exhausted, with blood caked under everyone's fingernails—except for Beatrice, who had not been allowed anywhere near.

Now though, the house smelled like cooking lamb chops, and Sunny bustled around the kitchen beaming. Klaus stood by the sink, eyeing the bowl the intestines were now soaking in. He wasn't yet sure how to go about curing them.

Violet came down the stairs from the loft, wearing a clean dress and wringing water from the ends of her freshly washed hair. She came up behind Klaus and rested her chin on his shoulder. "Do you want to try it?" she asked softly.

Klaus sighed softly and turned to face her. "And what if we do it wrong and it doesn't work?" He dropped his voice further and asked, in a tone that contained more emotions than just fear, "…what _would_ you think about us having a baby?"

Violet let out a long breath. "I think… Bea just started sleeping through the night, and frankly I'm _really_ enjoying that. I think… we're still talking about going back to the mainland someday, and if we had a baby together, what would we tell people then? I think… we have two _amazing_ little girls and I love them so much I feel like my heart is about to burst sometimes. I think if we had a third, it might just." She paused. "I think if we had a third, we'd be outnumbered by the kids, and that would make things a _lot_ harder." Violet smiled, but then her eyes turned sad. "I think Kit's labor _really_ scared me, and I'm not sure I _ever_ want to go through that—and definitely not here, with only you in attendance." She sighed again, and buried her face in the crook of Klaus's neck. There was disappointment in her voice as she murmured, "I think we don't know how to work with sheep intestines, and the risks of getting it wrong are too high." She pulled back to look him in the eyes. "I'm sorry."

To her surprise, Klaus chuckled softly. "It's nice to know you have all these worries too."

Violet laughed. "You don't have to do all the worrying around here!"

She could hear the apprehension in Klaus's voice as he asked, "And do you worry at all about… genes?"

"Because of incest, you mean?"

Klaus nodded, blushing.

Violet considered this. "No," she said slowly, "not really. What if—for sake of argument—a recessive genetic problem _did_ crop up? So what? Would having a disabled child be the worst thing ever?"

Klaus was quiet, thinking.

"Would you love our child any less if they were different?" Violet pressed. "If they were a hunchback, or a contortionist, or two-headed, or," she dropped her voice to a menacing whisper, _"ambidextrous?"_

Klaus had to laugh at that. Suddenly he felt much lighter. "No," he admitted. "Of course not." He shook his head and sighed, "I don't know. I don't think I know how _not_ to worry."

"I know." She squeezed his arm. "But… if the child might have a disability, that's yet another reason why being born here is a bad idea. What if we don't have the resources we need to help them?"

Klaus was quiet a moment. "Kit's… it was really hard on me too. I don't want to be the only person in attendance any more than you do. And if it was _you_ …" He had no words; he just shuddered and pulled Violet into a tight, protective hug. When he let go, he asked softly, "So what now?"

"Now… I think I'll experiment with the intestines a little. See if I can figure out how to cure them and sew them, in case we change our minds down the road. I'd like to learn how to work with them, even if we never use them for that."

"What else can you do with sheep intestines?"

"Make sausages."

Klaus's eyes widened, making Violet laugh.

"Alright, I won't do that. I'll find some other use for them."

"Do you think we're ever going to butcher a sheep again?"

Violet shivered. "Not for a long time."

Klaus nodded in agreement, but then gestured toward Sunny, who was at the stove, completely in her element. "She's _really_ happy though."

"Yeah," Violet admitted. "She is. Probably someday we _will_ do it again, and we'll get a second batch of intestines. And maybe then we'll try again—who knows. But for now, mouths and fingers." She rested her forehead against Klaus's. "I think we're doing pretty good with that anyways."

Klaus laughed. "Yeah," he agreed. "We are."

Violet cupped Klaus's face in her hands, but just then, Beatrice started to cry. Violet groaned, and gave her brother one quick kiss before stepping back. "See? I don't want to be interrupted _twice_ as much." She grinned ruefully. "I'll get her; you go get cleaned up?"

Klaus nodded, and Violet was halfway across the room before he suddenly called after her, "Love you!"

He remembered the plummeting caravan in the Mortmain Mountains—his chattering teeth forming a loose, rickety cage around the secret he has carried beneath his tongue. Hiding his very forbidden desires behind valiant fraternal devotion, he had locked his jaw shut around the words, leaving them to drum around his head like shoes in a dryer. _I love you, Violet. I love you, I love you, I love you._

Now that the words were free to be spoken, they were liable to slip out at odd moments. Every time, Klaus was amazed by how _light_ they felt on his tongue.

Violet paused and looked back at him over her shoulder, blushing slightly and looking pleased. "Love you too."

Before going up to the loft, Klaus paused to check on the second batch of meat, which sat sprinkled heavily with the salt Violet pulled from seawater. The salt drew blood out of the meat via osmosis. Blood was not kosher, and he and Violet were trying to keep kosher here on the island.

Klaus worried; he worried about _many_ things He worried that his relationship with Violet was somehow harming the girls. ("They say having parents who are happily in love is good for kids. Go to sleep, Klaus," she murmured to him, drowsy and half-muffled by the pillow.) He worried about the flammability of the wood-based house. ("I'll set up a sprinkler system next week. Sleep, Klaus.") He worried about disasters that could befall them on the island, isolated as it was. He worried about disasters that could befall them when they _left_ the island, which they both agreed they would have to do someday.

Keeping kosher was a counterbalance, one of many. The ability to have that level of control over their food—their _lives_ —felt like security, felt like home. And keeping traditions for Sunny and Beatrice made him feel grown up, in a very peculiar way.

He was and he wasn't, at the same time. But he thought, perhaps, he _understood_ now—close enough to both childhood and adulthood to see both sides. When a whiff of smoke from the cookstove caught his nose, shooting fear into his bones and transporting him back to the ashy ruins of his childhood home, Klaus thought he understood why Aunt Josephine's rules had been so absolute—although he vowed not to become her. When he heard Beatrice giggle over some delightful new discovery of the world around her, eyes filled with innocence and enchantment, he thought he understood why his own parents had hidden so many secrets from him and his sisters—although he vowed not to be entirely like them, either. And when he lay abed with Violet, tracing abstract patterns over the bare skin of her back, he thought, perhaps, he ever understood Olaf a little: _the light of a whole life dies when love is done_ —though he vowed, with all his might, _never_ to become like him.

And when Beatrice woke, crying, in the early hours of the morning, when Klaus would kiss Violet's temple and tell her to go back to sleep, when he would drag himself out of bed and carry the baby outside, climbing the hill to its crest, where the sky arched huge above them and the sea lay vast before them, and they would sit together, Klaus and Beatrice, watching the sky lightened to grey, then wan blue, and finally golden along the horizon—on those days, he often thought, for a moment, that perhaps he even understood a portion of the Great Unknown.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm primary a show fan; I did not read ASOUE as a child. When I was in 2nd grade, I picked up an ASOUE book, read Snicket's warnings, took them to heart and decided maybe this really _wasn't_ the book I wanted to be reading. So I put the book down and walked away.
> 
> But as I was writing this I got stuck, so I found a PDF of _The End_ online and skimmed through it. Skimming, of course, is not the same was reading, but the thing that really struck me is that the last book is _symbolic like woah_ , in a way the last episode isn't. This made me really sappy, which you can probably see as an influence on this piece. ( _Really_ sappy. So sappy that I wrote a whole side section about womb symbolism and motherhood, which I turned into [this](https://archiveofourown.org/works/17384984), if you're curious.) So this is partly show!verse and partly book!verse now. If you too are a show!fan, just know that the bit about _"while the other two children slept, one Baudelaire would carry the baby, in a sling Violet had designed, out of the arboretum and up to the top of the brae, where they would sit, infant and parent, and have breakfast while staring at the sea"_ comes from the book, and that it _completely ruined me_.
> 
> Final note: I am not Jewish, and my information about pulling the blood out of meat via osmosis with salt to make it kosher all came from google. There's a lot of information online about kosher meat, but it's all really _thorough_ —I'm not sure which are the parts that a not-super-orthodox family with no butchering experience would focus on. So please forgive me any errors, or—better yet—tell me about it in the comments; I'd like to know.


End file.
